News Roundup: May 6 - June 4

iDevGames has announced the uDevGames 2011 Macintosh game development competition will begin on July 1. There’s serious prize money across several categories up for grabs, so professional, hobbyist, and beginner developers alike should check it out.

After two years without a news post, the Residual team gave an update on their progress in late April. Residual is a fork of the ScummVM project that aims to support LucasArts’ 3D adventure games Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. Grim Fandango is now listed as “completable with a few minor glitches” on the compatibility list. Daily snapshot builds are provided on the Residual downloads page.

Keep reading for more emulator updates.

iDevGames has announced the uDevGames 2011 Macintosh game development competition will begin on July 1. There’s serious prize money across several categories up for grabs, so professional, hobbyist, and beginner developers alike should check it out.

After two years without a news post, the Residual team gave an update on their progress in late April. Residual is a fork of the ScummVM project that aims to support LucasArts’ 3D adventure games Grim Fandango and Escape from Monkey Island. Grim Fandango is now listed as “completable with a few minor glitches” on the compatibility list. Daily snapshot builds are provided on the Residual downloads page.

Legacy computer emulator OpenEmulator rev. 658 has been released. This update fixes a number of issues and implements/improves printing and copy/paste support. The developers are now turning their attention to the hardware library part of the GUI, which will let users add devices “at will.” For those not yet in the loop, OpenEmulator aims to use a software components framework, which allows the simple addition of expansion devices and peripherals (including virtual monitors), with initial focus on emulating the Apple I and MOS KIM-1 computers in Mac OS X. See the official site for more details.

Atari 800 emulator Atari800MacX has received its first update in 18 months. The new version adds support for 512 byte sector SpartaDos X ATR disk images and fixes a number of bugs. See the Atari800MacX website for more details and a download link.

XM6i, a Sharp X68000 and X68030 emulator, has been released. From what I can tell via Google Translate (the homepage is in Japanese), XM6i is based on XM6 by PI. It is still very early in development, and appears to be focused more on experimentation than software compatibility. Check it out here.

Keep reading for more updates, including new versions of ScummVM, Stella, Dapplegrey, MAME, and more.

Atari 2600 VCS emulator Stella has been updated to version 3.4. The new release makes numerous improvements to input handling, updates the internal ROM properties database to ROM-Hunter version, updates the built-in version of the PNG library, and makes a few other changes. See the official Stella website for a full rundown of the update and a link to the latest binary.

Point-and-click adventure game interpreter ScummVM has been updated to version 1.3.0. The new version adds support for Urban Runner, Playtoons, Toonstruck, Hugo series, Living Books, and Backyard Baseball, improves performance and offers support for the Mac and Amiga versions of some SCI games. See the release notes for full details on the update, or head over to the official site for a download.

RPCEmu, an Acorn RiscPC and A7000 emulator, has recently received source updates. M.I.K.e has provided a build on the MacScene forums, although there have since been further changes. See the RPCEmu website for more information about the emulator or to download a much older stable build.

SpeedofMac’s launcher for Nintendo 64 emulator Mupen64Plus has also been updated. Now called MupenRocket, the latest version of the launcher fixes issues with preference saving/loading and games not launching. Get it from the MupenRocket homepage. (You can learn more about Mupen64Plus from its official website or SpeedofMac’s Mupen64Plus page.)

Dolphin, a Nintendo Wii and Gamecube emulator, has been getting regular updates. Mac OS X builds were officially added last month, so drop by the Dolphin website for download links.

Arcade emulator MAME and its OS X port SDLMAME have been updated to version 0.142u4. As always, there’s a lengthy changelog (which you can see here). Head over to the official MAME website for more details or source code, or drop by the SDLMAME website for a version precompiled for OS X.

DOSBox front-end Dapplegrey has reached version 2.25.1. Updates from last month fixed a few bugs, including one crash bug that occurred when adding a game located on the root of a drive, and added readme files to the “Game Files” section of the GUI. See the official website for more details and a download link.

SpeedOfMac is still compiling the latest change sets for PlayStation emulator PCSX-Reloaded. Grab the latest version (67247 at the time of writing) from the PCSX-Reloaded section of SpeedOfMac’s website, or check out the official PCSX-Reloaded website for source code.

Open-source x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualisation tool VirtualBox has been updated to version 4.0.8. Once again, it’s a maintenance release. The update fixes a number of issues and bugs. See the changelog for details.